Job Shadows: What You Saw, Part 8

Here's a sampling of some of the various job shadows done by you all (this will be updated as job shadow reports are turned in, so please check back frequently). Take a look and see what you can learn from everyone's visits. There's a lot of good stuff here to help you decide what you want to do with your lives; what you need to be doing to get there; and what to expect when you do get there.

Please give each one of these a quick read as they come in, will you?

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For my job shadow I spent half of a day with Dallas Morning News writer Mike Heika. Heika has the main role of covering the Dallas Stars NHL team for the news, along with covering some college football and other sports around Dallas-Fort Worth from time to time.

For the day we spent together, I went to the meet him at the final day of the Stars development camp, which he was covering. There I got a first hand look at what it is he looks for to cover, while he was taking notes. For example, one of his prepped stories was on the South Koreans that were invited to the camp, and one of them had a great performance in the scrimmage. And although that would have been a great story, the Stars previous year first-round draft pick stole the show, and would make for a better story that day in his opinion. What I learned here from Heika was that a story can not be forced.

Another example of how a story can come to you happened just the previous day when the Stars made a blockbuster deal for Chicago Blackhawks forward, Patrick Sharp. Heika said, “It was even out of the blue for me, I knew it was the biggest story by far, so I immediately got on the phone and got to work on it. (Stars GM) Nill did such a good job of hiding it, it was a whole new story for me.”

There while watching and taking notes he was able to provide a lot of useful information when it comes to how to be a successful journalist. Heika told me about three main keys starting with what he believed was the most important, which is preparation. Heika said, “It is important to know everything you can about your subject.” When talking about preparation he also went on to tell me about the story selection process and dealing with preparation. Heika noted he usually comes into game nights with anywhere from three to five stories prepared and then in crunch time following the game is able to quickly produce a story for the news.

I thought this was interesting because Heika said, “I will sometimes get quotes for stories in the morning, and then if something I prepped happens in the game, I will already have quotes to use in that story.” It seems strange to me to get quotes before you even know what the story is, but he explained how you reference in the story that the quote was from the morning.

The second key was to use the human angle in stories. He said, it is key to remember the people you are writing for and about are just people, and almost everyone wants a humanizing angle to relate to. With this he said you just want to find the most interesting or important thing for people to know.

Heika’s final key he offered was to practice as much as possible when it comes to writing. Suggesting that writing for the school newspaper or a writing club would be good places to look for practice. As for the sports aspect, Heika touched on how it is a good idea to quote stats from online, and to have practice finding ways to incorporate putting those into your paper.

Heika was able to provide advice on what he wished he knew in college that he now knows today. Heika said, “Sometimes a game is going to finish around 10 p.m. and you are going to need a story out by 10:15. The main thing here is not to panic because as a deadline reporter you don’t have time. Writing the story actually is not all that difficult since you have them already prepped from that morning, and sometimes will only need to grab a quick post game quote.”

Continually, Heika was able to express to me how important it is to be prepared and not to panic because you will not have a clear thought process when it comes to your writing, which he mentioned as an important aspect.

During the interview with Heika I was able to learn something about this classes main point, which is getting it right. By this I am referencing the answer Heika had when I asked about a draft pick of the Stars from this year. I continually saw posts about the Russian, with some using a y in his last name, and others replacing that with an i. Heika said, “In an instance like that, you go by what the league has officially listed, not the player, not the team, but the league.” I found this interesting, but when it comes to getting it right for the NHL, the league is the correct source.

Overall, I had a fantastic experience meeting a writer, in Mike Heika, that read very often. The advice he offered was actually very helpful, and I learned about a lot of aspects I had never really known about before, which I believe will be very beneficial to me in the future.